Sunday, April 24, 2005

Long spring break, huh?

I'm beginning to realize that there are times when blogging complements other writing, but more often than not, blogging competes for the time. April 1 is a big day for us in journalism & mass communication education -- the deadline for annual AEJMC conference paper submissions. UNC Ph.D. student Barbara Miller and I sent off a paper on the effects of blogs on relational outcomes.

We developed some questionnaire items and built an index of the "conversational human voice," then conducted an experiment using blogs.msdn.com as part of the stimulus to see if the characteristics of communication related positively and measurably to relational outcomes of interest in PR theory such as trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, etc. Searls and Weinberger are right (no big surprise here), these factors do appear to correlate. Or at least they did in our study. I think time will show that our bigger contribution will be that we started to develop some somewhat-scientific measures of these variables that have been so important to the discussion of blogs and their impact (i.e., the stuff Robert Scoble talks about), at least since Cluetrain.

I've got to be careful not to "publish" the details here. This isn't a matter of secrecy, the kind UNC journalism professor Phil Meyer talks about being an issue for bloggers in today's Raleigh News & Observer (originally published in the 3/30/05 USA Today). Rather, it's just a matter of peer review. The blind peer reviews aren't in yet, so we're still a few steps shy of claiming accepted results in terms of the scientific method.